Today, its rooftop Sky Garden is a major tourist attraction. But go back a dozen years, and 20 Fenchurch Street was famous for frying passers-by.
They called it the Walkie Scorchie. In September 2013, London's newest skyscraper was reflecting 'death rays' onto the pavement, creating an unbearable patch of heat on Eastcheap. I remember it myself. The effect was real, and severe. It even damaged my camera:
The problem should have been obvious to any school child. Point a concave surface towards the sun and it'll concentrate the rays into a beam of light, and thereby generate heat. The Walkie Talkie not only has a concave surface, but also one that is reflective and south-facing. Cue, a powerful hotspot on Eastcheap below.
The press at the time went nuts for the story. City AM got the first scoop of a Jaguar car partially melting beneath the death ray. Sky News managed to fry an egg in the glare. The Evening Standard photographed a succession of attractive women standing nearby.
Londonist readers provided their own eye-witness testimony, beneath an article we wrote at the time:
- "Walked past it last week and the soles of my shoes had melted. quite embarrassing as was on the way to a job interview"
- "I walked through the area affected and felt really sunburned afterwards. The heat it is generating is oppressive and all I could think was "skin cancer anyone?!?"
- "A plastic bag melted in my hands outside the building due to the intense heat, I couldn't even look at the building, I've never experienced anything like it!"
Bad though this was, the developer was fortunate with timing. The problem only became apparent at the very end of summer, when enough glass panels had been added to the facade to focus the sun's rays. This gave them time to develop and install counter-measures before the hot glare could return. The tower was fitted with horizontal fins, which completely eliminated the problem.
Even before its car-melting troubles, the building found ill favour among Londoners, many of whom disliked its 'sore thumb' profile. While not the tallest building in the City, it stands away from the main cluster and so appears 'out-of-scale' from some angles. It would later go on to win the Carbuncle Cup, an award 'celebrating' ugly architecture.
In some ways, it's a pity the glitch was corrected. They could have made a feature of it; added a spot of human-scale quirkiness in a part of town characterised by towering walls of glass. "Come fry an egg in the Walkie-Scorchie's glare".
We even came up with a couple of alternative uses for the beam of light:
Keeping the feature would, however, have been a mistake. An academic study into the building's peculiarities later found that the "death ray" could actually have harmed people, especially the young and elderly. Further, the ray might easily have started a fire in adjacent buildings, had it fallen on easily combustible material. The building might have been called "The Class Action Tower" to go alongside its other silly nicknames.
Fast forward to 2025, and the Walkie Talkie's perilous reflections are starting to be forgotten — much as newer generations no longer call the Millennium Bridge the Wobbly Bridge. Indeed, the skyscraper has proved immensely popular among visitors. Its Sky Garden restaurant and viewing platform still attracts long queues, despite much competition from other free viewpoints. I wonder how many overseas visitors realise that the place was once London's hottest attraction for entirely different reasons.
